Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative coding

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Winning at the Venice Lido Casino

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Casino Gambling, Memoir

I had saved the $172.50 that I won in the casino in Atlantic City in a special envelope. I was going to use it for gambling the next time that I entered a casino. I took my “big winnings” with me for my next round of European wanderings. In Venice, the idea of going to the casino came up again.
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The Best University Ever: The “Free Association”

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

I was fascinated by the idea of an alternative university or “free” university. In the 1970s, there were alternative free universities in New York City. The most notable one was “the Marxist School.” Yet I never set foot in that place, not even once. I was much more attracted to the “Free Association,” a cultural and educational Center on 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan.
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First Year in France and Italy

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

What was unusual, and in a way crazy, about my plan, was that I was going to France to simply “live” there. I had no job. I had no affiliation with any university program. At least I had the project of learning French. My trans-Atlantic flight stopped in Reykjavík, Iceland. I got out of the plane, walked around the airport, and even ventured outside for a few minutes to breathe the far north air.
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Nursery School, Kindergarten, First Grade

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Memoir

The Sands Point School was housed in a sumptuous mansion on a sprawling real estate property that was adjacent to the sometime rough waters of the Long Island Sound estuary at Hempstead Harbor. The regal manor house on Elm Court was originally built with “old money” wealth around 1921, at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. The architect Egerton Swartwout had designed the stately home of twenty-two rooms.
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Cadillac to JFK Airport

July 31st, 2024 in the categories: Baseball, Memoir

It was two months after my twentieth birthday and my father was driving me in his Cadillac Coupe DeVille from my parents’ upper middle class split-level house in suburban Roslyn, Long Island to JFK Airport in Queens. I was going to begin my first attempt to create a life for myself on the other side of the pond. I had an open return ticket that cost four hundred dollars – that was a lot of bread – and was good for one year.